by AlicetheCurious » Thu Sep 28, 2006 4:52 pm
<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>The Pentagon’s hunger for money seems to be insatiable. The Bush Administration has requested a whopping $439.3 billion to feed its appetite the next fiscal year, an increase of seven percent.<br><br>This is just the regular military budget. There will be an estimated $50 billion in supplemental spending for Iraq and Afghanistan. And then there’s the money proposed to be spent on nuclear weapons, $16 billion, which is separately tallied in the Department of Energy budget. <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>This brings the total to at least $506 billion or so, provided the “supplemental” demand does not reach higher.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>What is the reason for this unrestrained expenditure? To maintain U.S. global supremacy in the years to come. Don’t take my word for it. Read the primary military strategy document of the Bush Administration, made public in September 2002. <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>“Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries for pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling the power of the United States,” states the National Security Strategy. No wonder The Washington Post said that the doctrine “gives the United States a nearly messianic role.”</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>It is determined to play this role, which provides an easy <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>cover for advancing U.S. corporate interests.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>Amazingly, U.S. military spending is now almost equal to that of the rest of the world combined!<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>“The major determinant of the world trend in military expenditure is the change in the USA, which makes up 47 per cent of the world total,” states the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a group that does invaluable work in tracking global military expenditures.<br><br>“US military expenditure has increased rapidly during the period 2002–2004 as a result of massive budgetary allocations for the ‘global war on terrorism’, primarily for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.”</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>As the group points out, much of U.S. spending has been not as part of the regular military budget, but as supplemental spending requests.<br><br>“The supplementary appropriations for this purpose allocated to the Department of Defense for financial years 2003–2005 amounted to approximately $238 billion and <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>exceeded the combined military spending of Africa, Latin America, Asia (except Japan but including China) and the Middle East in 2004 ($193 billion in current dollars), that is, of the entire developing world,” states SIPRI.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> “Thus, while regular military spending has also increased in the USA as well as in several other countries and regions, the main explanation for the current level of and trend in world military spending is the spending on military operations abroad by the USA, and to a lesser extent by its coalition partners.”<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://progressive.org/mag_apb020806">progressive.org/mag_apb020806</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>Question: Where is all that money coming from?<br><br>Answer: From the pockets of ordinary taxpayers.<br><br>Question: Where will this money go?<br><br>Answer: Into the coffers of huge corporations of the military- industrial complex.<br><br>Question: You mean, the same corporations that have received generous tax breaks during the past five years, while social spending that actually benefits people has been cut?<br><br>Answer: Yes. And they're also the same corporations that use those profits to "lobby" and corrupt your government, by providing them with perks and lucrative jobs through the revolving door between the military-industrial complex and government.<br><br>Question: Will this money make Americans safer?<br><br>Answer: Look at Afghanistan. Look at Iraq. Look at how Americans are seen all over the world, because of crimes committed by their military and their "US-based" multinational corporations.<br><br>Americans will NOT be safer, Americans will become more isolated and afraid, less healthy, less educated, more malnourished and subject to illness from a deteriorating environment.<br><br>Americans will be at the mercy of an increasingly tyrannical, secretive government that commands hundreds of billions of dollars annually, spent in developing more devastating ways to kill people, in mind-control psychological and drug experiments, in building concentration camps, and gradually closing down or infiltrating or buying out any alternative sources of information to its own propaganda.<br><br>What do you think?<br><br>Et in arcadia, you are so right. It was so easy to heap blame, hatred and contempt on the German people for allowing the Nazis to take over.<br><br>We forget that the Nazis were thugs whom everyone underestimated, including those who appointed Hitler as Chancellor in 1933, mostly because the elite considered him to be a useful ally against the "communist threat".<br><br>Once he revealed that he was not a ignorant buffoon, but a deadly serious military dictator, it was far too late.<br><br>Are you there yet? <p></p><i></i>
